Subject Runes - V1 Chapter 4

“At Room 307, Azoth Ferrum and Neon Ferrum will be staying together. Your luggage has already been brought in, so check your things first. As for the dorm rules and how to use the shared facilities, look through this leaflet.”

After receiving our room key at the front desk, we headed for our room. It looked like Dan had just finished checking in too.

“I’m in Room 306. What about you guys?”

“We’re in 307. Right next door.”

“Nice. Let’s get along as neighbors for the next three years.”

“Yeah.”

“Then see you tomorrow.”

“Later.”

We split up in front of the rooms and each went inside.

Room 307 was for the children of lower nobles, so it was a double.

Two beds stood side by side in the middle of the room, with two study desks placed by the window on opposite sides.

There was also a bath, a toilet, and a simple little kitchen. It was not spacious, but it was clean, and I thought it was a pretty decent room.

From what I had heard, rooms for middle-ranking nobles were private rooms with a separate space where one attendant could stay, and rooms for high-ranking nobles were probably even fancier than that.

Stuff like this really made the class-based nature of this society impossible to ignore.

“Phew.”

I sat down on the bed closest to the entrance.

“Neon, you can take the one by the window.”

“Got it. I’ll take that one.”

As I lay back on the bed, I looked back on everything that had happened today.

A lot of shit had gone down right after enrollment, but at least I had made friends like Dan and Marl. I had also joined the Dungeon Club. Getting marked by a middle noble had been rotten luck, but what was done was done.

“I’m taking the bath first.”

With that, Neon headed for the bathroom.

Neon changed out of the uniform and into thin roomwear. Short silver-white hair swayed softly, and without doing a damn thing to hide that pale, translucent skin, Neon hurried right past me. For a second, I did not know where the hell to look.

“You’re technically a girl, so act a little more modest, would you? I’m right here. At least be a bit more careful about what you wear.”

“We’re basically family, and I don’t care if you see me. Or what, are you actually conscious of me?”

“Like hell I am. Even if we’re family, it’s awkward.”

“Then don’t look. I want to relax in my own room.”

With that, Neon shut the bathroom door with a click, and before long I could faintly hear the sound of running water.

“Why the hell do I have to live in the same room as this one?”

Ever since we were little, Neon had spent a lot of time playing with me and had dressed pretty much the same way I did, so unless somebody explained it, nobody would have guessed Neon was a girl.

Around the time we received our baptism, a civil war broke out between factions inside Blomark territory. It turned into absolute chaos. Enemy troops pushed into Ferrum lands, and Selene and Neon nearly got kidnapped. On top of that, political marriage proposals came flooding in under the excuse of strengthening faction unity.

To avoid that mess for the time being, the head of the family had publicly announced Neon as the second son of a branch family. Still, after repeated internal wars, the battle two years ago had at least brought things to a temporary end.

The embers were still smoldering, but the risk was nowhere near what it had once been, which was why I thought Neon should have returned to her proper place as a girl by now. But if Neon was still hiding her sex, then maybe there was something I did not know, or maybe the head of the family had decided the danger was not completely gone yet. Either way, it felt ominous as hell.

The other thing bothering me was whether it was really okay to make it public at the academy that I was engaged to Selene. In noble society, marriages within the same extended family, so long as they were separated by five degrees or more, were perfectly normal. They did it to secure mana holders and preserve the unique magic passed down through a bloodline.

In the Ferrum family too, Selene, the eldest daughter, had strong mana, and once it was confirmed that I, a branch family member, had manifested mana in two attributes, the head of the family immediately decided on our engagement. That decision had already been publicly announced together with Selene’s confirmation as the next family head. So normally it should not have been any kind of secret.

And yet, when I enrolled, the head of the family advised me not to talk too much about the engagement inside the academy. I had not been told why. Maybe it was something related to academy life. Maybe it had something to do with territory politics. I had no clear answer. While I was turning all that over in my mind, I ended up falling asleep just like that.

That night, I had a dream. It was about that day, the day my memories of my previous life suddenly came back during the baptism ceremony when I was five.

In my previous life, I had been a third-year high school student. My college entrance exams had finally ended, and I had at last been freed from that long stretch of study hell. The last thing I remembered was the walk home from the exam site, my heart pounding with excitement over the college life waiting for me. After that, my memory cut off completely. Then, before I knew it, I was standing in a dim room in the body of a young boy.

I had been born as the eldest son of a branch family of the knight-ranked Ferrum house, and that day I had gone to church to undergo baptism, following the customs of the Argent Kingdom. During that ceremony, each child underwent a ritual to determine whether they possessed mana and, if they did, what attributes they had.

The Ferrum family might have been low-ranking nobles, but they were still nobles, and only those with mana could inherit the house. That was why, branch families included, they wanted as many mana-bearing children in the clan as possible. Under the worried, hopeful gaze of my family, I stepped into the baptism ceremony.

The church stood in a small town within Ferrum lands, and there were not that many children, so commoners went in one by one first, entered the baptism chamber, and placed their hands on something like a crystal ball to test for mana. Then my turn came.

What if I don’t have any mana?

I gently placed my hand on the crystal in the baptism chamber. The moment I did, two colors appeared inside it: red and brown. Fire and earth. I had been blessed with two kinds of mana. The instant I relaxed in relief, thinking, My family will be happy, the memories of my previous life burst back into my head without warning. In that moment, I understood my death in that other life and my reincarnation into this world. Then all the rest of those memories came flooding in at once, and I lost consciousness.

When I woke up, I was lying in a bed at home. Outside the window, the sunset had dyed the world red, and it was just about time for dinner. I got out of bed and headed alone for the dining room, but just beyond the door I heard the voices of two men talking. I stopped short and listened instead of going in.

“If no boy with powerful mana is born into the main house from this point on, then Selene will inherit the family. I would like her to marry Azoth instead of bringing in a husband from another house.”

It was Darius, the head of the Ferrum family, saying that to my father, Roel, who belonged to the branch family.

“Understood. Selene is the eldest daughter and a powerful mana holder. Even if she does not end up inheriting, having those two marry would still strengthen the clan from a mana standpoint.”

Selene, the eldest daughter of the main house, was one year older than me. Since the main house and branch house stood next to each other on the same estate, she had often played with me since we were little. She was a beautiful girl with long silver hair and big red eyes that matched her fire attribute, and her mana was far stronger than that of other children her age.

In the Argent Kingdom, noble houses still leaned slightly toward male succession, but because mana mattered so damn much, it was not unusual at all for a girl to inherit. That was why Selene was already being counted on as the next head of the Ferrum family.

And now that today’s baptism had revealed I possessed fire-attribute mana, that meant an in-family marriage partner had been secured who could be expected to inherit the Ferrum family’s traditional fire magic. That was probably why they wanted to settle Selene into the role of successor right now. The idea that I was apparently getting engaged at the age of five was shocking to me, especially since I had only just gotten my memories of my previous life back, but honestly, being engaged to a beauty like Selene made me happy.

“But I’ve got to admit, seeing both fire and earth manifest was a surprise. There must have been an earth-attribute ancestor somewhere, and the blood resurfaced. Even for upper nobles that would stand out, let alone a mere knight house. And not just one child. Two.”

Two? The children from our clan who had undergone baptism that day were me and one other. The kid who always stuck to my back, always wanted to play with me, the little tagalong who would wipe a runny nose with dirty hands and end up with it dried all over the face like some damn rascal. That was Neon.

“I was shocked enough when Azoth turned out to have two attributes, but when Neon did too, that really got me. So, are you still planning to marry Neon off to another house?”

“That’s right. Neon has two attributes too, which makes her valuable. If we can make good use of that in a political marriage with a higher-ranking house, all the better. I have no intention of selling that cheap.”

“Azoth and Neon are close, so I figured it wouldn’t be a bad idea to marry them off to each other someday.”

Because Neon usually dressed like a boy, I kept forgetting she was a girl, but she was actually the second daughter of the main house, Selene’s younger sister. More importantly, the conversation was going in a really screwed-up direction. It sounded like my fiancée was about to get switched from a beautiful girl to a little rascal. I rushed into the dining room to cut off the flow of the conversation.

“You’re finally awake, Azoth. We’re celebrating your baptism.”

Inside the dining room, the main family living next door had gathered together with my parents from the branch family and the rest of our branch relatives.

“Darius just spoke to us. It’s been decided that you and Selene will be engaged, and Selene will become the next head of the Ferrum family.”

My father, Roel, was actually Darius’s uncle, but he was only a little older than Darius himself, and apparently they had been raised almost like brothers. That was why he treated the family head more like a younger brother, and nobody seemed bothered by it. I guess even among nobles, knight-ranked houses were laid-back in that way. Darius and I were cousins, by the way.

“It might not feel real to a five-year-old like you, but when you grow up, you’ll marry Selene and support the Ferrum family. Or would you rather have Neon?”

“No, I understand. I will become engaged to Selene, and I wish to protect her as her knight.”

I knelt before Selene and, childish as I was, made a knight’s vow.

“Thank you, Azoth. I’m counting on you.”

Selene answered with a smile.

Neon had been watching that whole exchange without changing expression. Then, for some reason, Neon suddenly walked right up to me and copied exactly what I had done, making a knight’s vow to me instead.

“I will protect you… as Azoth’s knight.”

What the hell was this one thinking? I could never tell with Neon.

“Hahahahaha. Maybe Neon suits Azoth better after all. Look how attached she is.”

My father had to throw in that useless comment, and I hurried to cut him off. Meanwhile, Neon stayed kneeling in front of me, traces of snot still on the face, staring at me with a completely serious look.

That was when I woke from the dream.

“Morning.”

My eyes slowly came into focus. Neon was leaning in close, peering down at me. Compared to the five-year-old Neon from my dream, the fifteen-year-old Neon in front of me now looked so much more grown-up, and seeing the face up close like this, I found myself thinking that Neon had started to look a lot like Selene.

“M-Morning.”

Starting today, our new life in the student dormitory would begin.

Neon and I had grown up together from the time we first became aware of anything, practically like siblings, but this was the first time we had ever actually lived in the same room. It still felt a little awkward, but I figured I would get used to it eventually.

We quickly took the bath we had missed yesterday, changed into our uniforms, and left the room.