NBFTR 04

Chapter 4 

The Hundredth Day

Day 24.

Airy humbly concluded that she had at least reached the threshold of intermediate-level magic studies.

The image of a fried-beef sandwich wandered through her mind like a ghost.

She missed the young master.

And she hated him terribly.

Day 29.

She learned the real name of that brat, no—of Master Lottie.

The obsessive who had meticulously written his name after every date, including the year, had accidentally let his real name slip.

Luent Seymour Salisbury.

The young master’s father, the heir to the current Grand Duke of Salisbury, and the name of the Marquis himself.

Airy was not particularly moved.

She merely thought that once she got out of here, she would try calling him “Lord Lottie” just once.

Day 35.

Airy had finished looking through the entire second layer of bookshelves.

Between the two layers, she had probably gone through nearly one hundred and twenty books.

To celebrate herself, she gorged on sandwiches until she threw up a little.

While cleaning up the mess, she accidentally disturbed the mana circle, and as a result, she couldn’t brush her teeth before going to sleep.

Airy lamented her miserable situation and shed a single tear.

Day 44.

Perhaps her passion for scholarship had begun to fade.

Or perhaps the books had simply become too difficult.

Either way, she found herself spending more and more time lying still and daydreaming.

She began to think that if she wasn’t careful, she might actually develop a mental illness.

So she started doing light exercises with her bare hands.

Day 51.

While absentmindedly skimming through a magic book she had been reading on and off for a while, Airy discovered a section about the magic circle drawn across the floor of this basement.

With astonishing concentration, she devoured the entire book in one sitting.

And, absurdly enough, this magic circle was a space-preservation magic circle.

There was also a locking spell that meant only the person who opened it from outside could open it again from within and leave.

That’s right.

It was a self-contained boarding school.

Thinking about it now, Lottie’s great-great-grandfather had been one of the kingdom’s founding heroes and a great mage whose name still appeared in history books.

With that kind of background, it made sense that someone could draw such an extraordinary magic circle in his own basement for the purpose of educating his children.

Airy cried a little.

She had been forced inside.

Would she really be able to get out?

Would this long, endless loneliness be rewarded once she returned outside?

Who would ever understand the vivid mind and body of Airy, preserved so delicately in shape and light?

Airy slowly walked along the edge of the glowing magic circle.

Then she spotted a place that could be called its end.

And then she discovered it.

It was almost laughable that she had never noticed it before.

Now that she had, she could see that most of the outermost circumference of the circular magic circle had already been erased.

Like sand falling through an hourglass, the magic circle was disappearing from the edges inward.

“If it all disappears, the spell will stop, right? Please tell me that’s true.”

If, for whatever reason, she had been forgotten outside, Airy had no choice but to wait until the magic circle’s activation ended—

unless she deliberately starved herself to death or somehow got crushed beneath the mountain of books.

She briefly clasped her hands and prayed for survival.

Then she committed the overall shape of the magic circle to memory.

Seen this way, it looked almost completely unfamiliar.

Fifty-one days had passed, and one circuit of the circle had been erased.

If one handspan was approximately fifteen centimeters, then the diameter of this circle was…

Airy lay flat on the magic circle, a pen tucked behind her ear, and began calculating.

A formula she thought she had forgotten suddenly came back to her.

After a while, she reached a conclusion.

“One hundred days. It should take about a hundred days. Probably a hundred days, right? There’s no way those perverts could tolerate a number that doesn’t come out evenly.”

Mages—

especially magic scholars—

were all perverts.

Airy had realized that every single day and every single hour in this basement, so she was confident in the figure of one hundred days.

Carefully spreading out the hem of her skirt, which had begun to wear thin, she knelt.

“From now on, you are my god.”

She solemnly whispered this to the magic circle, which had about fifty days of life remaining.

Then she clasped her hands and bowed deeply.

With desperate sincerity, Airy offered another prayer before whispering once more.

“I don’t care if there’s an error. Please disappear faster. I miss Mom.”

She missed her mother, who by now was probably working as a maid in some small southern town, completely unaware of what had happened to her daughter.

Missing one’s mother had to be a universal language, didn’t it?

Hoping that the magic circle had a mother somewhere too, Airy once again renewed her desperate feelings in her heart.

Day 58.

Suddenly tired of living, Airy decided to go through the bookshelves in the first row again as a way of renewing her resolve.

Reviewing what she had already learned gave her a surprisingly meaningful impression.

Day 69.

She wanted to kill the young master.

Unless there was some unavoidable circumstance, she vowed to exact bloody revenge on him for the rest of her life.

Day 77.

Out of nowhere, she was struck by a powerful sense of regret over the limits of her mana.

If only her mana had been sufficient to support all the knowledge she had gained here, she might not have become a great archmage, but she could have reached the level of a high-ranking fourth- or fifth-grade mage.

A rise in status of that magnitude would have been enough for her to look back someday and think that even this imprisonment had been worth enduring.

Airy cynically revisited the innate limitation she had despaired over so thoroughly in the past.

Day 85.

Airy began lying flat on the floor to read books or daydream.

The magic circle had diminished considerably, so if she wanted to read, she had to ignite a light spell herself.

Airy’s small, precious mana circle couldn’t last very long.

Three or four hours at most.

Of course, she had no motivation left either.

Day 93.

Nothing held her interest anymore.

She spent the entire day staring at the magic circle.

She had reduced her meals to one a day, and she was sleeping a little more.

Day 99.

She did not eat.

She slept only for very short periods.

Day 100.

Nothing happened.

Nothing happened.

Fuck.

The magic circle had gone completely dark, leaving only a section about the length of one finger.

It wouldn’t stop functioning until even that last piece disappeared.

Airy had expected there to be some error in the date since she had no clock.

She had also only estimated the length of the magic circle.

She understood all of this.

But it was still incredibly difficult to suppress her anger.

A large hole appeared in the center of Lottie’s notebook.

It was the mark left by her fingernails after she had gouged at it.

She thought she would apologize to the Marquis later, but honestly, what could anyone do about something like this?

She had been trapped here for more than a hundred days.

If they demanded compensation, she would just sue the young master of this household.

Airy bit her nails.

There was nothing else to do.

Day 105.

Airy spent five days lying beside the magic circle, which had been reduced to roughly two finger joints in length.

She couldn’t be certain it had really been five days.

She was eating less, and there was no objective way for her to know how much she was sleeping.

After an indeterminate amount of time that no longer seemed to matter…

She stood books upright along the path of the already-erased magic circle and began playing dominoes.

Not even a single fragment remained that could emit light.

After another indeterminate amount of time that no longer seemed to matter…

She stopped sleeping.

A strange excitement kept her awake.

Lying facedown on the floor of the pitch-dark basement, Airy watched the faint resonance of magic.

And finally—

the moment the hairline crack of light disappeared—

Airy experienced a rush of joy more intense than any pleasure she had felt during her entire time here.

The faint hum of magical resonance vanished.

Silence.

Darkness.

Airy staggered to her feet.

There was nothing in the basement she felt any attachment to, so she didn’t look back.

The path to the exit was unbearably long.

Airy crossed it in a dozen-odd stumbling steps, then leaned her body against the door without a handle and gently pushed.

Creeeeak…

The door opened without much resistance.

Light spilled inside.

Airy squinted at the unfamiliar brightness and sniffled.

She was so dizzy that it felt as though she were on the verge of death.

She pressed both hands against her violently pounding heart, as though something terrible might happen if she didn’t.

Then she waited for her vision and consciousness to recover.

Until now, Airy had thought countless times about the possibility that other people might see her as abnormal.

But she had never considered the possibility that what lay beyond this door might not be the normal world she knew.

Airy couldn’t help but panic.

At the top of the twelve steps that had appeared in her dreams countless times—

there was no longer an interior room.

There were no walls.

No structures.

Only an empty sky.

“What the hell? Am I hallucinating?”

She knocked on her own head twice.

The sky was crystal clear, without even a trace of fine dust.

There were clouds.

And something that looked like a bird.

No.

It was a monstrous bird.

The creature Airy had mistaken for a bird was flying rapidly toward her.

“What the hell! What the hell?!”

She inhaled with her mouth hanging open, only to realize that the air was much hotter than she had expected.

She immediately covered her mouth.

Then she curled her body inward, folding herself into a ball.

Suddenly, someone threw themselves over Airy and wrapped their body around hers.

From the weight and force of the embrace, she could feel an overwhelming instinct to protect her—so strong that she couldn’t sense even the slightest hint of hostility.

“Explode.”

A low, dry male voice rang out.

The monstrous bird, which had almost reached the edge of the stairs, was blasted backward nearly ten meters by a flash of power.

Then it exploded into countless fragments.

Even then, Airy couldn’t tear her eyes away from the monster.

It was instinctive.

The instinct of someone who had sensed death.

Only a moment later did she remember the protective presence wrapped around her back.

And recognize the voice.

Trembling as though she were having a seizure, Airy kept one hand over her mouth and turned around.

A man with an extremely gaunt face stood before her.

His appearance alone was enough to prove his Salisbury bloodline.

He was staring directly at Airy, his brows drawn tightly together.

For a moment, neither of them could say a word.

Airy Aster’s mind was a complete mess of rational speculation, emotional certainty, and overwhelming fear that had yet to fade.

And the man—

gripped her shoulder blades hard enough to feel as though he might crush them.

His dry, gloomy face twisted further and further.

Airy tried to defensively explain who she was.

But the man was faster.

“Airy.”

His trembling eyes grew red.

Tears filled his deep-set eyes, light catching in their unripe olive-colored irises before spilling helplessly down his cheeks with a single blink.

Airy looked into those pale-rimmed eyes.

At that tearful expression, she knew for certain.

The man’s face overlapped with the face of the youngest son of the employer she had been caring for until a little over a hundred days ago.

Airy forgot how to speak.

And slowly sank backward onto the floor.