It was Tommy, looking down at me with spite stuck all over his face like freckles.
"Yeah, figures. You’ve looked like you’ve had a lot on your mind lately, so I guess you were spacing out. You need to watch where you’re going."
Tommy was a kid the prince had picked up somewhere, like he always did, three months ago. It wasn’t like with me, where he’d personally stepped in and brought me in himself, but still.
The butler, Philip, reported that there was a pretty sharp kid who’d suddenly lost both parents in an accident, and the prince nodded and told him to bring him. Philip said he’d heard the kid’s story and personal details from someone who’d been trained at this estate and then gotten a job at a shop. In other words, it was a system where someone who’d been trained here first recommended another kid.
The moment I learned about that kind of pyramid-scheme-like network, I got curious about how I’d ended up being known to the prince in the first place.
"Who told you about me?"
The more I thought about it, the less I could think of anyone who would’ve recommended me. Before I came to this estate, the only people I’d met were drifters and drunks.
The prince, who’d been mechanically nodding while reading paperwork, lifted his head and looked up at me. He seemed to be thinking, and for some reason I got tense. I was already working here as an attendant, and it still felt like I was in an interview.
"A lot of people recommended you. Want me to list all their names?"
"How would they even know me?"
"You were famous. Nobody knew your name properly, and your boss just called you something like 'country bumpkin' or 'hey you,' but they said there was this kid with a terrifyingly fast mouth and a terrifyingly fast hand at doing the money. They said it looked like you were going to steal all their regulars, so they begged me to hurry up and take you."
It was a recommendation that I couldn’t tell was praise or not. The prince told it with a smiling squint, too.
Going by the prince’s habits as I’d read them so far, it was more like it fell on the bad side. The prince was the type who chose to smile in situations where he really ought to be angry.
"Shit, the one who can’t keep his eyes open because he’s off in la-la land isn’t me. It’s you, you fucking bastard!"
It was an insane, sudden lunge. Because of Tommy, who slammed into things like an eight-ton truck that had never had brakes to begin with, I snapped out of my reminiscence.
Come to think of it, I’d originally been trying to think about how that punk had ended up in this estate, but somehow I’d wound up replaying my own employment origin story instead.
Looking back, it made sense that Tommy would be pissed. He probably dyed my clothes with tomato soup because he wanted attention. And I’d been thinking about something else the whole time.
Yeah, I understood the mechanism behind the eight-ton truck’s sudden lunge.
But I didn’t know why he wanted my attention. And I didn’t need to.
Tommy and I were the kind of relationship that was naturally supposed to have little contact. I served at the prince’s side, while Tommy was supposed to be in the kitchen trimming vegetables and washing dishes. If it weren’t for mealtimes like this, it would’ve been normal for us to never run into each other.
The thing was, Tommy constantly slacked off on his work, so he showed up in my line of sight a lot. He wasn’t where he was supposed to be, and he was where he wasn’t supposed to be, so many times that I finally said something to him. It was the basic, obvious line: do your job properly. Ever since then, whenever Tommy saw me, he picked a fight.
I couldn’t understand Tommy’s mental state at all, but I also knew there was no point trying to understand the boiling hormones kids have around this age. I’d gone through the same phase as Tommy. And the me now couldn’t understand the me back then. If I don’t even know myself, how would I know you?
At most, I could guess he was unsettled because he was about to leave this estate. A job had already been arranged for Tommy, but the best job was this estate itself. The prince couldn’t employ every kid he brought in, and after a certain amount of training, far more people left than stayed.
Because the kids arranged so far had performed well, there was no shortage of placements. Sometimes, there were people who tried to take them on purpose to dig into the prince’s affairs, like the king had sent a spy, but our side cut those cases off.
Still, in Tommy’s case, it was worrying. With that temper, it felt like the side that arranged his placement would end up getting cursed out.
I decided to give him some friendly advice.
"If you live doing whatever you want, your insides might feel comfortable, but your pocket is going to get lighter than a feather. If I sue you right now, I can collect the cost of these clothes. Tomato soup won’t come out no matter how hard you scrub, and the circumstance that I can’t do my work in front of the duke wearing a white shirt stained red will be taken into account. There are plenty of witnesses, too. And this shirt is too expensive for you to compensate with your obvious pocket situation. You won’t be able to cover it all with whatever you’ve saved up, so I can garnish your future wages. No employer likes an employee whose wages are being garnished because he caused an incident. Of course your pocket will shrink even more. So when you work from now on, don’t get heated and slam into customers. Control your emotions. Worse than getting fired and having your pocket end up empty is the fact that the customer might return something even worse than what you did."
Tommy had eyes, so he probably wouldn’t pick on just anyone, but in this neighborhood, you couldn’t judge someone’s strength properly just by their outward appearance.
Even I could fling fire right in front of his eyes. The current me wasn’t the raw beginner from a year ago who could only spark a flame and then snuff it out right away because I couldn’t feed it oxygen. I was a beginner who could burn his hair with fire and put it out with water before his scalp got damaged.
I wasn’t trying to brag about how I’d gone from raw beginner to beginner. I wanted to point out the fact that he didn’t know I was a mage who could hurt him.
And the part about the shirt he ruined being expensive was just the plain truth.
But the atmosphere got weird.
I was the one who’d been attacked out of nowhere, I was the one who’d just gotten cursed at, I was the one who’d kindly given advice, and yet everyone in the dining hall was looking at Tommy, not me. With eyes full of pity. Even Paul, who had great empathy and was friendly with everyone.
Tommy’s face had turned so red his freckles were almost completely hidden, and he was so resentful his eyes were filling with tears.
"Did I hit you?"
At this point, it almost felt like I was the one who, just like Tommy, had lost my temper and really beaten him down, and then brainwashed myself into believing I hadn’t hit him.
"Oh, come on..."
Someone among the onlookers felt sorry for him.
"Does he really not know, or is he pretending not to know?"
Someone clicked their tongue.
"Beating someone with words is still beating them."
Someone nodded like I’d assaulted Tommy.
It was unfair to me, but this kind of situation wasn’t completely unfamiliar. When I ran a jewelry store, it was an everyday thing.
Even if the customer was being unreasonable, I was the one who had to apologize.
"I’m sorry."
Tommy wasn’t a customer who filled my pocket, but I apologized anyway. Because I didn’t have time. I had to finish eating now to make it to dinner. After I finished eating, I had to change clothes, and after that, I had to finish preparing to receive guests before the scheduled visitor arrived.
Wasting time bickering with this punk was no different from throwing away money, so it was easier to just lower my head and move on.
It didn’t cost extra money to say I was sorry.
But then Tommy started shaking so hard his shoulders were trembling. What is wrong with him? The words were about to come out on their own.
Tommy grabbed the collar of my shirt while I was still sitting and shoved his face right up in front of mine. If it weren’t for the situation and the way my collar was clenched tight, you might’ve mistaken it for a love confession.
"-."
He whispered in a small voice only I could hear. Then he released my collar like he was roughly shoving me away and ran off and vanished.
I clenched my teeth.
"I’m honestly curious what Tommy said, but you’re not going to tell us, right?"
Paul spoke as if he were representing everyone else’s opinion. At the same time, he was speaking for my position too, so I nodded.
"Yes. I’m sorry for causing a disturbance during a time we should be resting."
"Our attendant honestly handled it in a pretty gentlemanly way. Tommy was the one who picked a fight for no reason."
I put on a professional smile. At the end of Paul’s sentence, someone tried to add, "No, it’s because he likes..." and then got cut off. I didn’t hear it clearly because the pronunciation got crushed, but even if I had heard it clearly, it felt like it didn’t matter. No reason could justify Tommy’s sudden lunge.
Paul continued with an awkward expression.
"He’s probably anxious, Tommy. You say he’s getting sent somewhere else again after just three months here. He’s still a kid."
"That’s true."
"Though, I guess that’s not much of an excuse since you’re still young too, attendant."
"No. I understand perfectly."
That that bastard is a fucking bastard.
I lifted the corners of my mouth again and replayed the bullshit that fucking bastard had spat out.
※
"Depending on a gemstone’s weight and quality, there’s a difference in how much mana it can accept. Designing a magic circle precisely and engraving it is important, but measuring the gemstone’s maximum mana capacity accurately is also important."
The prince spoke as he laid out rubies of different weights and grades.
"If you put in more mana than the gemstone can accept, it looks like it works properly at first, but it breaks down quickly. On the other hand, if you put in too little, you can’t fully use the gemstone’s potential."
Just like the first magic attribute I manifested was fire, the magic circle lessons also started with rubies, which were mainly used for fire-attribute magic.
"Sometimes, like with mass-market watches, you deliberately use only a small capacity so it lasts a long time, but that’s not the direction mages prefer. Usually they want to fill it to the limit. Part of it is to show off competence by engraving multiple spells into a single gemstone, but the real reason is cost-effectiveness. Like how we engrave this and that function into high-end watches to encourage regular gemstone replacement."
I’d asked the prince over and over when I would finally be able to learn about magic circles. His answer was always the same: "When you can properly handle attribute magic." Very firmly.
It was like asking someone coming down a mountain, "How much farther to the summit?" and no matter where they were standing, getting the answer, "Just a little farther."
As I succeeded with attribute spells one by one, the next assignment was to control opposing attributes at the same time. I asked again.
"When will I be able to take magic circle lessons?"
"When you can properly handle attribute magic."
Even knowing I was being strung along, I had no choice but to keep walking forward. That’s how much I’d been waiting for this class to start.
But when the time I’d been looking forward to finally came, the prince’s words were passing through my right ear, circling in my brain for a moment, and then slipping out through my left ear.
Instead, what kept circling in my head was what Tommy had run his mouth about to me.