Swamp Girl! Chapter 34

Ten years?

No, just from looking at Leon, it wasn’t all that out there.
By my calculations, that would put Leon’s current age at twenty-eight1, but that did match his appearance, so.

So, Leon was twenty-eight, huh. He was quite a bit older. Like a ten year difference?

That aside, if what he said was true, there was one problem. My current appearance.
Soul or not, as long as the body was alive, its appearance would mature. Based on the discussion, this body of mine was twenty-six years old, but at the very least, it didn’t look it.

…I got that far before suddenly remembering that Palmira was twenty, so I took a step back and admitted that it wasn’t impossible. But I bet a gap between looks and age as big as Palmira’s was quite rare. It wasn’t an everyday thing.

“Ten years… Yes, ten years. And yet, your appearance is no different. You look almost — no, exactly the same as the last time I saw her, ten years ago.”

My heart thumped in my chest, seeing Leon looking at me with such a serious face, but I was thinking the exact same thing.
So that meant Leon didn’t know much about what happened after he saw [Chris] ten years ago?

“You mean, you don’t know what happened to [Chris] for those ten years?”

“Do you?”

He turned the question back on me.
So he didn’t know. Of course, neither did I. I shook my head by way of reply.

“…The only thing I do know is that afterward, someone… took her body away.”

“Took her body away?”

On reflex, I parroted those disturbing words back at him.
Not ‘stolen’, but ‘taken away’. At the same time, the indifferent coolness I sensed in Leon gave me a bit of a shock.
…Well, it did happen ten years ago. Leon might have compartmentalized it.
Because he was currently looking at a version of her.

“Yes, the body should have been secured in the Schola Magorum. But one day, according to a report from the Schola, it had been [taken away]. As things stand, it was a strange case. Earlier, I said it was a special inst.i.tution, but it’s for that very reason that stealing from it is close to impossible in the first place. However, such a situation deliberately went unquestioned at the time. If I had to say why, my guess would be that handling the body would have been difficult, given its connection to the loss of the six-Attunement magus.”

“It would have drawn attention to the loss of something troublesome.”

‘As you say.’
His head hanging slightly, Leon answered as if he took it personally.

“Still, I searched for her, as far as my reach could take me. Though it has become a mere excuse, I think of it as my atonement. But I couldn’t find a single lead on her whereabouts. For what purpose was her body taken? Even the motive was a mystery — and so ten years went by. Just as she was fading from my mind, she suddenly appeared before me. In other words — you.”

Leon turned to look at me. That pair of eyes pierced through me with their strong determination.
Suddenly, the story had come to me. The breath caught in my throat.

“The truth is, I was surprised. I was genuinely surprised. For you see, the figure before me looked just like the one I had seen ten years earlier. On the other hand, I thought it was impossible. Because you were completely different in terms of personality. Moreover, the state you were in.”

Leon chuckled. He was remembering what happened back then, I guess.
For some reason, I abruptly grew embarra.s.sed and turned away.

“Not like I could help it. Quit laughing.”

” — My apologies. In any case, I couldn’t believe it at first. It was something like that, I suppose. The same physical appearance, but from ten years ago. And everything else was completely different. But normally, you’d think of it as an uncanny resemblance. Nevertheless, you resembled her too closely. Especially with that silver hair.”

This?
Pulling on my bangs, I brought some of that hair down to my eyes.
Sure, if it were just the face, then whatever. But when even the hair color was a match, it wasn’t exactly easy to dismiss. I mean, this color was impossible to begin with.

“Had it not been for that hair, I suppose I would have kept my distance without issue. And yet, when we first met, I was fighting to maintain that boundary, you know? For that reason, I even exposed you to considerable danger.”

“Now that you mention it, I was ruthlessly forced to play a slave.”

Well, it wasn’t like I was dragged into it kicking and screaming. It was a job to me, plain and simple.
I didn’t feel all that resentful about it either.

“Ah, I do apologize for that. But… at any rate, your confession that day changed my way of thinking. It was when you said you [became a woman]. Hearing your story, I developed a theory, one that verged on conviction. Right now, you’re thinking the same thing, aren’t you — that [you] are possessing [Chris’s] body.”

I remembered Leon’s behavior upon hearing my confession, as well as the series of exchanges we had when he showed me [Chris’s] portrait the next day.

I suppose he’d been thinking about the possibility of possession since he heard my story. From that perspective, his actions since then all made sense.
Even what happened that night on the river bank… I can’t say that it’s a complete mystery to me.

“However, this is all I currently have. At present, I’m in the process of re-examining my findings, but regretfully, much remains shrouded in mystery.”

“By ‘examining’, you mean the business with Artor?”

What I heard earlier today at the guild came back to me.
The military had the Artor Ruins in quarantine while they worked on something.
So that was on Leon’s orders, I guess.

“True, that’s also an area that requires investigation. However, it would be difficult with our current personnel, so it will wait until after we a.s.semble a specialized task force for the investigation of the labyrinth.”

Huh?
From the sound of it, Leon hadn’t made a move on Artor yet.
A bit confused, I checked with him.

“Then you aren’t investigating Artor right now?”

“As of yet, no,”

he said, like it was no big deal. It didn’t seem like he was lying.
In that case, who has Artor on lock-down right now?

…Wait, is Artor really on lock-down?
The distrust I felt toward Arc back then.
Again, it tugged at my mind.

“…Actually, I went to the guild today. I want to know how things were going at Artor — well, more precisely, where my original body was… Anyway, I heard about it there — the military occupation of Artor.”

Leon fell deep into thought.
From the looks of it, it was probably fair to say this was news to him.
In that case, I understood less and less about what it meant.

“a.s.suming that’s true, it may have been a mistake to postpone matters concerning Artor… I don’t know who those forces answer to, but it seems necessary to investigate their affiliations. It’s difficult to say whether we share the same objective or not… I’ll have Regnum look into it.”

Ah, that gloomy guy?
Wait, did he come with us? I hadn’t seen him around at all.

“Considering the various possibilities, he’s qualified to lead the general investigation.”

“Oh, okay then.”

I gave Leon the rundown on the information I’d gleaned from the guild.
In addition, I told him about the several adventurers who had gone through the twelfth labyrinth since I left it and suggested that he look into them while he was at it.

“There certainly seems to be a need to investigate them concurrently. I’ll see to it.”

Phew. My information proved useful, more or less.
Well, that said, it did nothing for the guilt I felt for basically piggybacking off him.

“But the guild, is it…”

For the nth time, Leon lapsed into deep thought.

“What, something on your mind?”

“At the moment, nothing worth mentioning, no.”

He shook his head.
It worried me all the more to be dismissed like that. But I figured that it would be rude to ask him over and over now that he was back to thinking again, so I decided not to mind it.

And so silence prevailed.
Looking at Leon, he’d been lost in his thoughts the whole time.
I probably needed to put my thoughts in order too. But so much had happened today that I couldn’t get my brain working.

Suddenly, I turned my face upward. The elm’s many branches were black silhouettes against the backdrop of the starry sky.
Here and there, starlight filtered through the criss-cross of those dark shadows.

— I wonder if the stars look pretty from the top of this tree?

As if influenced by the dreams I’d had again and again, the thought suddenly popped into my head, with no rhyme or reason.

I stood up.

I knew Leon had noticed and was looking up at me, but ignoring him, I jumped at the lowest branch.

“Ufh–…kuh–”

And so, before he could say anything, I clambered up the branches like a madman.
Hey, wait. [Chris] aside, this is my first time climbing a tree. Now I remember, huh? Great.

I still had a little higher to go until I could see the sky. I looked down at Leon from my perch.
He was looking up at me with a dumbfounded look on his face. The sight of it made me grin.

“Come on, Leon! I bet the stars a–!”

“!!!”

The moment I called down to him in triumph, the branch under my feet snapped and sent me tumbling down.

For a moment, I was suspended in the air. And in the next, I found my body settled firmly in Leon’s arms.
Not again. I mean, if I could die from embarra.s.sment — .
I got caught up in the moment, following a whim just because it was a long-awaited opportunity. Now look at me. So, so awkward.
Unable to say a word, I curled up into a small ball in Leon’s arms.

“Seriously… You surprised me.”

“Ahhh… can it, idiot…”

Leon’s surprised expression melted into a gentle smile. It just made me even more embarra.s.sed, and I hid my definitely blushing face behind my hands.
I could hear him chuckling.
Don’t laugh. I brought this on myself, though.

“…I’m sure [Chris] has forgotten, but the truth is, something similar happened once before.”

Leon looked up at the tree as he spoke. From between my fingers, I trailed his gaze up.

“She fell from the top of the tree. That time, I wasn’t able to catch her, and she was injured as a result. Since then, I began to wait below her.”

His unexpected confession drew a sigh from me.
I sensed an inexplicable emotion filling my heart. Trying to quash it, I said,

“Leon.”

“Yes?”

“…Umm…thanks.”

My hands were still covering my face.
Maybe, by some chance, it was the memories of [Chris] inside me that drove me say so.

Author’s Notes
I’m sorry, it was a little short on plot development.
Incidentally, the number of characters in a chapter usually ends up around 5000 or so.

Footnotes
1. Here’s a math problem for you: How old is Leon? He could be twenty-five (cast page), twenty-eight (this chapter), or twenty-six (calculations).
He was eight when he met [Chris], ten when they separated, sixteen when she “died”, and the ten-year time skip puts him at twenty-six. Who knows, though. [Chris] gets some similarly questionable math later on. /shrug ↵

…Oh G.o.d, the end of this chapter though!! And [Chris] just thought he was being stubborn.