ODD 4

Chapter 4

“Hey, why are you crying?”

Aidan’s voice brought me back to my senses. Right, this wasn’t the time to be crying.

I raised my arm and rubbed my eyes roughly, and Aidan, unable to hide his appalled expression, took a handkerchief out of his pocket.

“What is wrong with you as a girl? Did you learn nothing from watching the other young ladies at the academy? I told you so many times to maintain your dignity as a noble.”

Normally, Aidan’s nagging about “dignity as a noble” would have annoyed me first, but I didn’t feel upset at all. No, rather, I was glad.

“See, I told you I was right.”

I spread the diary wide open and thrust it in front of his eyes.

“My father definitely exists!”

At my excited voice, his green eyes narrowed. With an expression that said, “What nonsense is this,” his pupils moved slowly from left to right.

“So you’re saying this was written by your father?”

“Yes!”

Where could there be more certain proof than this? I clutched the diary tightly and spoke.

“He must have gotten caught up in something. My father has always been so full of affection — even if he was clumsy at expressing it, he was always restless because he couldn’t help but help others.”

He was that kind of person, even if he never showed it.

A person who gave affection even to a single flower blooming by the roadside. A person who, if he saw a stray cat, would go out of his way to come back and give it something.

A person like that — so of course he’d save this country too, and raise a discarded child like me with love. A child abandoned in front of a gate that was about to burst open, whose parents had died.

“Finally gone mad. You’ve definitely gone mad.”

Aidan shook his head and continued.

“How on earth could a person get caught up in some incident and have their very existence disappear? If what you say is true, the people of this village couldn’t possibly not know your father. Your neighbors, the mercenary band members your father supposedly worked with — they should remember him.”

“That’s why I’m saying he got caught up in something! How could a person’s existence itself be erased? In this whole world, only I remember him. Ah, and this diary too…….”

Why hadn’t this diary disappeared? When I went home, none of Father’s belongings remained.

“There must be something in this diary.”

“I don’t know what nonsense you’re spouting. It could just have been written by the bakery owner or by you.”

Aidan seemed unable to believe it until the end.

“It’s possible to leave as a simple runaway, throwing away clothes and photos and such. But you can’t manipulate other people’s memories. No matter how advanced medicine becomes and science develops, completely erasing someone’s memories — unless everyone collectively got amnesia — is absurd.”

He was right. It really was absurd.

“Unless it’s magic…….”

At my involuntary murmur, a sneer was drawn across his fair face.

“Ha, are you a five-year-old child? Believing in things like magic.”

“Ugh, I don’t believe in things like that either! I was just saying it as a figure of speech!”

There’s no such thing as a wizard in this world who waves a staff and makes things go “ta-da,” like in fairy tales.

But then again, Father disappearing in the first place wasn’t realistic either.

“So I’m going to investigate. As you said, Young Master Winslow, a person vanishing in an instant is absurd. My father must be somewhere.”

This diary is the only clue I have left.

“I need to go home and read this diary carefully from the beginning.”

The part I read was only the last page of the diary. This diary is quite thick, after all. If Father wrote in it steadily, there might be something I can infer from.

“Wait, I’ll go with you.”

“……What?”

“I said I’ll go with you.”

The black umbrella, exactly like him, tilted toward me.

“You know full well you’re not in your right mind right now — how could I let you go alone? That wouldn’t be something a noble should do to a lady.”

He really seemed to think I was insane. At this point, I felt stubborn. I wanted to see this arrogant young master apologize to me later.

“Fine, let’s go together.”

Was my answer satisfactory? The corners of his mouth, which rarely smiled, twitched upward.

“But you can hold the umbrella straight, you know.”

I opened the umbrella the bakery owner had found for me earlier from the lost and found box.

“I-I know that.”

With an expression that showed he had no idea, Aidan walked ahead of me.

“Wait, that’s not the right direction!”

“……Then guide me.”

His ear tips seemed uncharacteristically red, but Aidan was blocking the view with his large umbrella, so I couldn’t confirm properly.

* * *

I took the key out of my pocket and opened the door.

Come to think of it, was the house clean? But if I told him to wait outside, it would be like advertising that my house was dirty.

Besides, there’s no need to look good in front of Aidan anyway, so it should be fine, right?

“This is, your home?”

“Yes, this is my home.”

I never dreamed that the first guest to the house I’d prepared to live in with Father would be Aidan, though.

“So, this is a house?”

“Yes, please come in.”

“Really, this is a house?”

Does it look like a stable, then? How many times is he going to ask?

“Yes, yes. It’s a house. Despite appearances, I bought this house with a big resolution and even took out a loan.”

To Aidan’s eyes it might look like a shabby house, but realistically, among the houses I could afford, it was the best.

At my sarcasm, he straightened his head that had been looking around and closed the door.

“Ahem, that’s not what I meant. I just thought it seemed a bit big for you to live in alone.”

“That’s because it wasn’t a house meant for living alone.”

It was a house meant for just Father and me to live in.

It was a chance to repay the grace of having raised me. But that chance disappeared before it could even come.

I quietly bit my lip. I couldn’t show tears in front of Aidan.

“Ah, I see.”

He answered indifferently and sat down on the sofa in the living room as he pleased.

“Ah, don’t bother with tea. This house probably doesn’t have the fine tea I drink.”

Who said I’d give you any? I wanted to snap back, but as he said, our house had no fine tea. It was full of only coffee to wake me up every morning.

‘Still, he’s a guest in my home, so I should treat him politely.’

But since Father always said something about that, I gave him a glass of water and took out the diary.

“Wait. Before looking at the diary, first tell me about your father. I need to know something to figure out what clues to focus on.”

“Ah, right. So, my father is…….”

I explained about the person named Ashford Violetta.

“You remember the gate that turned the continent upside down when we were very young?”

One day, a black rift of unknown origin appeared in a peaceful rural village.

Investigators were immediately dispatched, but nothing could be determined beyond the fact that tremendous energy was being measured there.

The tragedy began exactly one week later.

Monstrous creatures poured out of the rift, and the village was erased from the map within two hours.

People began calling that suddenly appearing rift a “gate.”

There was no set rule for when or where they appeared, but it was certain that once one appeared, a week later, monsters beyond human comprehension would pour out.

The gates were a catastrophe for humanity.

“After many sacrifices, the Gate Research Institute was established, and they discovered that each gate had a one-week gap.”

“You know that the gates disappeared exactly 18 years ago, right?”

“Yes, because they discovered that magnetic fields could interfere with gate formation.”

Powerful magnets, neodymium, were installed in each region to prevent gate occurrence. It was a kind of barrier.

The empire had reported it as the victory of great science.

Even if memories of Father had been erased, the things Father had done hadn’t disappeared.

“The person who discovered that gates could be closed with magnetic fields was my father.”