Irritation seeped into every movement.
Masumi drove her shoulder into the front doors of the familiar mansion and forced them open.
They were too enormous to push wide with her arms alone; it would take time, and she didn’t have any left for patience. She knew full well she was in a foul mood—half of this was pure displaced anger.
Perhaps because it was well past midnight, no one waited in the entry hall. Only the bronze nude statue in the center of the grand staircase—leading up to the second floor—stood there to greet her in silence.
In the dimmed lighting, Masumi strode straight through, boots of fury carrying her toward the room she wanted.
On the way back from the outskirt house where she’d been abducted and confined, Masumi had been carried in Kasumireaz’s arms.
The moment they returned and he set her down at the front gate, she began walking without so much as a sideways glance. Kasumireaz—who had clearly intended to escort her—followed after her in a rare, flustered hurry. All the way to the front entrance, Masumi fixed her stare dead ahead and demanded, “Where’s Arc?”
“He should be back in his room,” came the clipped answer.
Even Kasumireaz, who had just fought a full-blown battle, seemed unable to find words in the face of Masumi’s murderous momentum.
Before long, they arrived.
Kasumireaz started to say something—but Masumi didn’t wait. She knocked and opened the door in the same motion.
She swept her eyes across the room. It was too large to be called a mere bedroom. The lighting was bright; the bed to the right was pristine, not a wrinkle out of place. The sitting area to the left was empty as well—no one on the chaise, no one in the chairs.
The man she wanted stood at the far end of the room by the window.
The tall figure in knight’s attire turned.
“Good work,” Arc said. “That was quick.”
“Because you said to finish it before your blood vessels burst,” Kasumireaz replied.
He closed the door carefully, soundless.
Arc’s expression softened—until his gaze met Masumi’s. His brow drew tight at once.
“That’s a dangerously violent face you’ve got there. What’s—”
“What’s what is right—I got dragged through the mud, insulted six ways from Sunday, and I would love to know what in the world is going on!”
Arc blinked.
＊ ＊ ＊ ＊
“What is with him?” Masumi slammed a fist into the table. “He doesn’t know anything and he just runs his mouth like he owns the place!”
The expensive stone table didn’t so much as tremble. Only Masumi’s hand took damage—yet she didn’t even feel it.
If there had been tea on the table, the cups would have rattled with a lovely, grating clink. But it was the middle of the night; there wasn’t even a glass of water. At least she wasn’t waking the whole house.
Across from her, Arc and Kasumireaz both leaned back in instinctive self-preservation.
The argument with the man in black—the words he’d thrown at her—came roaring back, and remembering them only stoked the fire.
She had started out relatively composed. But the more she explained what had happened, the angrier she became, until her voice sharpened into something bordering on feral.
And now she was hurling every last disgraceful thing he’d said at the two men with her whole body and soul.
“‘Useless,’ ‘infamous,’ ‘you’re better off leaving them to rot’—who does he think he is? Like you want to be without musicians! Like you’re choosing it! If he has so many complaints, why doesn’t he do it himself? That loud-mouthed idiot can’t even play a violin!”
“Hey, calm down, okay?” Arc tried to soothe her, hands hovering uncertainly in the air.
It didn’t even dent her rage.
If anything, his attempt to make it go away only poured oil on it. Bam. Masumi slapped a palm down on the table and surged to her feet.
Both men leaned back even farther.
“Aren’t you angry?” she snapped at Arc. “Doesn’t it bother you that he mocked your own knight order to your face?!”
“That’s not even the real issue here—”
“Don’t you start backing down! You’re the Supreme Commander!”
On pure momentum, Masumi seized Arc by the collar.
Then she shook him. Hard. Back and forth, again and again.
There was too much of a size difference for it to do anything in practice—Arc barely moved—but he simply wore a baffled look and let her do it.
“Why am I the one being lectured…?” he muttered.
“For now,” Kasumireaz said quietly, “I recommend you not oppose her.”
The two men exchanged a glance and murmured to each other in a grim sort of agreement.
Masumi ran out of strength before Arc ran out of steadiness. Breathing hard, she dropped back onto the sofa, still bristling. She had a thousand more things to say, and the fact that her body wouldn’t keep up was infuriating in its own right.
Even as she tried to steady her breathing, her face remained stubbornly scowled.
Arc took the opening with a weary sigh.
“Fine. I understand more or less what he said. But why are you this furious?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You weren’t the one being insulted,” Arc said plainly. “He was describing our reality. And it’s not as though he was entirely wrong. Though…” He shrugged, then gave a small, resigned laugh. “I didn’t realize we’d become that infamous.”
Kasumireaz, seated beside him, wore a complicated expression but didn’t speak. Neither of them seemed interested in defending themselves.
That blunt acceptance made Masumi clench her jaw.
“For years,” Arc continued, “we’ve heard it. Nearly a decade, at this point.”
“So if it’s ‘true,’ anyone can say whatever they like?”
“At this point, it’s hardly new.”
“…Is a knight’s oath really something that can be treated so lightly?”
Her face tightened, and she couldn’t force the words out all at once.
The weight of what it meant to be protected pressed too hard on her chest.
To put your body on the line. To sweat and bleed for someone else. To stand there because you’re needed—because some burden must be borne by someone, no matter how unpleasant it is.
From safety, with clean hands, people threw stones and called it righteousness.
“Is that all it is?” Masumi’s voice shook. “That kind of work? You’re risking your lives. Or am I the strange one for thinking that matters? Am I naive? But I didn’t want him—someone who kidnaps people and does nothing but complain—to talk like he has the right to judge how you live.”
She had been moved, deeply, by the vow at the investiture ceremony. Because she had lived in peace, the people who could make that oath had seemed dazzling—almost painfully so.
It took strength to keep a vow.
To stay humble and sincere. To endure without breaking. To keep going when it’s miserable, to not toss everything aside and say, Enough. I’m done.
Most people couldn’t do it.
Masumi had judged herself and looked away from her own path.
Maybe that was why it hurt. Maybe it was something like self-disgust. Masumi and that man in black—neither of them could truly become a knight. In that one sense, their positions were the same.
“…Sorry,” she said at last, swallowing. “I couldn’t say any of this to him. So now I’m frustrated, and I took it out on you.”
“…No,” Arc said quietly. “I’m the one who should apologize.”
She couldn’t tell what, exactly, he meant by that. And she didn’t have the strength to push for clarity. Masumi only breathed in and out until the tightness in her chest eased.
“Tell me,” she said finally. “Why did so many musicians quit? What actually happened?”
Arc’s gaze drifted, distant.
“You have the right to know,” he murmured.
And then Kasumireaz took over, carrying the explanation in Arc’s stead.
What the Supreme Commander’s right hand described was, indeed, brutal beyond reason.
“Used up.”
That was the meaning—because Arc’s magical reserves were so vast that he could cast the highest-tier spells, repeatedly, without pause. In a single breath—like the fire sphere that erased the pack of Wolves—he could spend the equivalent of three average full knights.
For Arc, it was nothing.
For the musician responsible for replenishing him, it was like caring for five, ten knights alone.
On paper, the solution seemed obvious: increase the number of musicians.
But there was a vicious constraint.
The amount of recovery, Kasumireaz explained, was heavily affected by the number of notes—and the accuracy of pitch.
The more notes in a unit of time, and the more precisely those pitches were placed, the more strongly magic responded and surged back.
Meaning: if you wanted to refill a vast reserve, you had to play difficult music for long hours without stopping—and you had to play it with unwavering accuracy.
For a performer, it was cruelty disguised as an equation.
String instruments—especially those without frets—were simply more vulnerable to pitch slipping in complex passages. It was an unavoidable reality of the instrument’s design.
And even defining “correct pitch” was its own kind of nightmare.
The system for deciding pitch relationships is temperament. You choose one reference pitch, and build everything else from it. That framework isn’t singular: just intonation, Pythagorean tuning, meantone, unequal temperaments, equal temperament—there are many.
Frets come with benefits and costs. If the instrument is properly tuned, frets allow anyone—even without perfect pitch—to land the intended notes. But the price is that the temperament becomes fixed, and modulation becomes severely restricted.
A fretless instrument, on the other hand, can change temperament at will; modulation is free—if you have the ear and technique to place every pitch correctly.
Freedom raises the difficulty. That, too, is fact.
From the way Kasumireaz described it, their string instrument—the Vilard—clearly favored the latter path. And if their musical culture was mature at all, it made sense; rich music rarely stays trapped in a single key forever.
Either way, the more technical the piece, the more relentlessly it demanded true skill.
And that skill wasn’t something you built overnight.
To find someone who could play difficult works repeatedly, evenly, without pitch wandering even slightly—those candidates were rare.
But stocking up on mediocre musicians didn’t solve anything.
If their technique forced them into simpler pieces, the recovery per unit of time plummeted. Worse still, if pitch accuracy dropped, the effectiveness dropped with it—making the whole effort nearly worthless. Arc’s reserves would never truly fill, and they couldn’t simply throw anyone into the role.
So the musicians screamed.
Not metaphorically. In reality.
And so Arc’s dedicated musician was the first to break, then the rest followed—one after another.
Long hours. No rotation. No relief.
It was an easy word in Masumi’s world.
A black-company workplace.
Different reasons, perhaps—not cost-cutting, but a simple lack of qualified people. Yet the shape of the suffering was painfully familiar.
The phrase from an older era of Japan drifted through her mind: Can you work twenty-four hours?
“Corporate warrior” sounded noble until you remembered what it truly meant: shaving your life away for someone else’s output.
Even if someone promised double the results for the price of a year of your lifespan—how many people would smile and accept?
It was… bleak.
In the end, humans were humans everywhere.
Blond hair and blue eyes didn’t guarantee an easy life. A beautiful face didn’t make a workplace paradise.
Masumi swallowed the knot in her throat, then pushed on—urging Kasumireaz to continue.
