She never got to see the bare face that should have been exposed at such close range.
The instant their lips met, Masumi had squeezed her eyes shut. And when his breath grazed her throat, she’d reflexively turned her face away to escape.
Now the black cloth covered the young man’s face once more.
His purpose was still unclear. Since arriving at this vacant-house-like place, he had fallen silent as if his earlier loquaciousness had been a lie.
After the struggle on the lookout platform, Masumi had been abducted with her freedom stripped away.
The binding spell was flawless, so deft it gave her an unpleasant sense of déjà vu. Someone she knew, for instance, a certain Captain of the Guard, also possessed a striking talent for this sort of handiwork. Perhaps in this Albarique Empire, being able to tie a person up neatly was considered the minimum standard of competence.
Everyone did far too much, far too casually.
While Masumi was admiring the technique in entirely the wrong way, the young man hoisted her up and sprinted through Vestofa at night. Compared to Ark and Kasumireaz, he did not look particularly blessed in stature. But if he could pull off a stunt like this with a whole person in his arms, then beneath that black garb he must be quite thoroughly trained.
He vaulted lightly over rooftops, slipped through back alleys without a sound.
That ninja-like movement never once drew the eyes of passersby. Eventually, they reached a quiet residential area on the outskirts of town.
He entered one house where the lights were out. It hardly seemed like his own home, but the door wasn’t even locked. The wooden door opened with insulting ease.
Darkness welcomed them in.
They were likely in the living room at the center of the house, but the only thing Masumi had to rely on was the white moonlight spilling through the window. She strained her eyes desperately, and then, abruptly, the room brightened.
A soft orange glow spread outward.
She searched for its source. The young man had turned his right palm upward, and above it floated four or five small light-orbs.
With her view secured, she finally took in the space in detail. As expected, it looked like a living room: sofa, table, shelving. Everything was draped in white cloth.
A long absence, perhaps. Or perhaps the furniture was being kept covered while someone tried to sell it.
A forlorn air slept quietly in the room. In any case, a fine layer of dust made it clear no one had visited in a long time.
Which is to say… this is probably trespassing.
A man willing to abduct someone by force was not the type to have acquired this house through proper channels. He had surely investigated that no one came and went, then used it as a convenient hideout.
Between being slapped with a spy accusation out of nowhere and being forced into complicity with a crime like this, which was worse?
Assume a lifespan of eighty years. She hadn’t even passed half of it yet, but she doubted she’d ever again live a day where she had cause to compare these two options. What a precious experience.
A wretched one, unfortunately. Hard to deny this was rock-bottom.
As she drifted through such thoughts, the young man tossed Masumi onto the sofa.
Thump.
Dust billowed up with the sound. She coughed, then sneezed twice in quick succession.
It was rough treatment, but far better than being dropped on the floor. While Masumi was spinning that into the most pathetic form of positive thinking imaginable, a dry rustle sounded through the room.
Following it, she saw a small scrap of paper in the man’s hand.
Something was written on it, but at that distance she couldn’t make out the content. Even if she could, there was a good chance it wasn’t a language she knew, but still.
She watched, intent. He ran his eyes over the page for a moment as if checking for any mistakes.
Then the young man lifted his face and looked straight at her.
“Now then. Who’s going to be the first to come and retrieve you, I wonder?”
The narrowed eyes were rich with provocation.
Just as he had when he produced the light-orbs, the man raised his left hand into the air. A rose-colored flame bloomed softly. It spread like a large flower unfurling, then took the shape of a bird.
Wings that burned like a phoenix, despite their rosy hue. The bird pecked at the letter in his right hand and swallowed it down.
The bird’s body flashed once, and in the next moment, with a beat of its wings, it dissolved into the air.
“Too much for the lower ranks. Banaret-class seems appropriate.”
Masumi had no idea what the mutter meant.
Just as Ark had pointed out, she truly knew nothing. She didn’t even have a grasp on how dire her situation was.
But that letter the bird had swallowed made her skin crawl.
It wasn’t a missing-person notice.
And it certainly wasn’t a love letter.
Given the circumstances, it could only be a threat.
Wait. This voice…
Masumi took a deep breath, trying to calm herself, and realized the young man’s voice had a familiar timbre, as though she’d heard it somewhere before.
Where?
Not a distant memory. Something recent.
She stared at the man’s face. Sensing her gaze, the black-clad figure, who had been watching the window, finally looked back at her.
But he said nothing. Ever since the rose-colored bird vanished, he hadn’t spoken a word.
She needed more to go on.
If she heard him just once more, she felt she could place it. And if she knew who he was, perhaps she could begin to guess what he wanted.
“Who are you?”
If she stayed silent, nothing would change. Her arms and legs were already tied, leaving her helpless.
But since she hadn’t been gagged, Masumi decided to press her advantage while she could.
Pitch, the height of a voice, could be faked if one tried. Human voices, in particular, could shift even in ordinary speech. An adult could raise or lower their voice by two octaves without much difficulty, and with training that range could expand. Even assuming the words still had to be intelligible, four octaves could be controlled.
Pitch was something you could manipulate.
But you couldn’t change the quality. That was timbre.
Even when one says “sound,” the attributes that define it are numerous. Pitch, volume, and quality especially drew out differences. They also gave music its color. Pitch and volume could be altered with intent, but the sound quality one was born with could not be changed by one’s own power.
Timbre was the attribute that made the same note, at the same pitch and volume, sound different depending on the source.
Put simply: even if both were playing the same A at 442 hertz, a piano and a violin would never sound identical. If they did not sound the same, it was because their timbres differed. Sharp or soft, keen or deep. The difference was obvious between instruments, but the same idea applied within a single “family” of sound, including the differences between individual human voices.
Masumi’s ear insisted it remembered this voice.
It was an ear she’d trained since childhood. She had enough pride in the effort she’d poured in to trust the instinct.
The man tilted his head a fraction, guarded. Still he didn’t speak.
Masumi needed to push harder. She fired questions in quick succession.
“Where are you from? What’s your name? You dress like that, but are you a knight? A mage? You abduct someone and you’re going to tell me you’re just a civilian?”
A deeper crease formed between his brows.
He was reacting. He clearly had things he wanted to say, but seemed to be swallowing them for the sake of position, restraint, or caution.
For Masumi’s purpose, it was perfect. Make him speak just once. That was all she needed.
If she acted a little foolish and pressed again, surely he’d snap out a retort or two.
At the cost of having “idiot” stamped on her forehead, perhaps. But in an emergency like this, she couldn’t afford pride. Being abducted was a first in her life, and she had almost no bargaining cards at all.
“Are you… someone from the underworld? Hired by somebody?”
“…You think I’d tell you?”
Ah.
Her hearing, sharpened to its limit, cleanly hauled an old memory out of hiding.
A question answered with a question was more than enough. Once she guessed and verified, the telltale traits were unmistakable.
Gray eyes.
Back then he’d drooped his brows as though troubled, and even his manner of speaking had sounded like a different person.
It was that young man.
Hide the mouth, change the way you speak, tense your brow in caution, and a person’s entire air could transform this completely. Masumi couldn’t help being astonished by the audacity.
“You’re the one I bumped into in the city…”
His brow twitched upward.
“For someone who was only half listening, you sure remembered.”
“What do you want?”
“Across all times and places,” he said, “there’s a certain sort of person in a knight order who’s always the most likely to have their life targeted. I think you know which one.”
So it had been a threat letter after all.
Masumi had been “selected” as bait to lure Ark out.
In a sense, it was almost an honor.
But it was also a profound misunderstanding.
“I hate to break it to you, but I don’t think I’m worth much as a hostage.”
“That’s a bluff. I looked into it. You spend the night with him.”
“Th-That part is true, but…”
Don’t say something that embarrassing with a straight face, please.
She had a mountain of objections, but this wasn’t the main issue. With resignation, she let it slide.
The black-clad man shrugged, as if he didn’t care what nuance she meant.
“He’s the Supreme Commander’s personal musician. Right now he’s probably tearing the place apart looking for you.”
“…Mm, I don’t know about that.”
“You don’t?” His voice sharpened.
“Not like that. Before we even get to contract renewal or next year, there’s a bigger problem. I’m under suspicion as a spy.”
“…So you are,” he said flatly—then stopped. “Wait. What?”
His eyes widened. Beneath the cloth, his mouth was almost certainly hanging open.
He looked utterly lost.
Masumi had only tried negotiating because it couldn’t hurt, but being met with that level of shock was irritating.
She hadn’t asked for a spy accusation. She needed to make that clear.
“I apparently wandered into the garrison by accident and got labeled suspicious right away. And on top of that, in the chaos, the real musician ran off. So they demanded I ‘take responsibility’ and I ended up as an emergency substitute.”
Which meant that while she was, on paper, certainly a personal musician, in reality it didn’t match at all.
Sleeping in the same room did not automatically make her important.
The man’s brows furrowed as he processed her words.
“A garrison? Vestofa’s knights’ garrison?”
“Yeah. Probably that one.”
“And you ‘accidentally’ trespassed?”
“I was irritated, sure, but I didn’t mean to.”
At this point, even reflecting felt complicated.
People said, curse someone and you dig two graves, but for merely resenting a happy couple on a holy night to end up in this mess felt, at minimum, wildly unfair.
Still, the man before her looked even more bewildered.
At least one thing had landed: the Masumi he’d imagined and the Masumi he had were nowhere near the same.
“There should’ve been an intrusion-detection spell on the garrison,” he said, voice turning sharp. “How did you slip through it?”
“How should I know?”
“You don’t remember? Then you were a ‘hidden caster.’ That would make sense.”
“No, I really don’t think that’s it.”
Masumi cut him off before the misunderstanding accelerated.
If this continued, they’d never meet. She had done this once already. She knew where it went.
Musician on the surface, suspect in truth. With her “outrageous declaration” and her inability to provide a coherent explanation, the black-clad man promptly looked at her as if she were dubious.
“You’re saying it’s not? Don’t tell me you forced your way in head-on with brute strength. That’s… bold.”
“That’s not it either.”
“Then another spell?”
“Please stop fixating on the method of trespassing. More importantly, I’m not a spy.”
The gray eyes blinked.
“…What? You said you’re under suspicion, didn’t you?”
A perfectly reasonable question. It was Masumi herself who had said it.
This was going to be a nightmare to explain.
“How do I put it… my memory’s a little broken. I woke up inside the garrison grounds, and I don’t know how I got there. Truly, before I came here I was just living peacefully as an ordinary person. I can’t use magic. So even if you call me a spy, I can’t gather information or anything. I don’t want to do anything to the Supreme Commander. I didn’t even know Ark existed, so I was in a ‘Who even are you?’ state.”
“…Then why would they suspect you as a spy?”
“That’s what I’d like to ask.”
The conversation broke off.
After a full ten seconds of silence, the man clicked his tongue, loud and vicious.
“This is… did I choose the wrong person…?”
“Probably. My condolences.”
At last, it seemed to have sunk in. The black-clad man pressed a hand to his forehead, as if he had a splitting headache.
Strictly speaking, his aim hadn’t been wrong.
Given the knights’ situation, a musician really was someone who ought to be protected and treated with care. In reality, Ark and the others did treat Masumi that way. They kept a certain degree of caution because of the spy suspicion, yes, but still.
If she had been the true, rightful musician who’d fled, then the man’s assumption would have held. The knight order would have erupted.
A musician they wanted desperately. If it became “that” sort of workplace where musicians were abducted, they’d only be avoided even more in the future. No one would want such rumors. They would have thrown out search parties in earnest.
In that sense, she would have made excellent bait.
What the black-clad man intended to do after that was unclear, but he must have planned to use the uproar to set something in motion against Ark.
Only, the crucial musician had been swapped out.
Worse, not an official musician at all, but a suspect with a spy accusation clinging to her.
At that point, the meaning of “important” changed at the root. A musician disappearing would hurt them. A spy, in the worst case, was not someone they would mourn.
The timing had simply been, somehow, the worst possible.
Watching his shoulders slump so clearly, Masumi felt a flicker of sympathy, and also thought, frankly: you should’ve checked more carefully.
If she said, “For a kidnapper, you’re oddly sloppy,” would he tighten the ropes until they bit into her skin?
